Meet Unknown Company 4.
As we’ve mentioned before, due to various circumstances some Ultimate solution users restrict our options in releasing related information.

In this case, the modesty of Unknown Company 4, which provides major Russian enterprises with financial flow management services, is defined by both the intimate nature of the business and its multi-billion ruble volumes.
Money loves silence, as you know, and the example of Mr. Khodorkovsky illustrates what the doctor ordered for Big Money.

Before Ultimate implementation, services that UC4 provided for hundreds of customers by efforts of tens of salaried accountants and lawyers, were ‘automated’ by the combination of MS Sharepoint and MS CRM.
​The readers who have experienced these products firsthand won’t be surprised by the use of quotation marks.

Sharepoint was used to store background information on customers: account details, executives, reference information (tenancy agreements with expiration dates), scanned copies of charter documents and contracts.
The same with data on customer companies’ employees.
Attached files structure was at the discretion of the person who added them.
‘Versioning’ of the continuously obsolescent document collection was done manually.

Management of tasks/assignments (‘send delivery man to tax agency’, ‘open account in XXX Bank’, ‘certify copy of company charter’, ‘register increase of ownership capital’) was done via Microsoft CRM: they created ‘tasks’ – in a free format.

As far as complex ‘tasks’, i.e. if their execution required more than one activity owner, their ownership changed through a ping pong editing of the owner field. With rather obvious implications in terms of Ordnung, commitment and timing.

The Ordnung at large was through the roof: after importing existing data into Ultimate it turned out that two thirds of existing ‘tasks’ were overdue.

The ‘after’ picture – when the brilliant products dated back to good old Bill Gates times were sent to the well-deserved rest, and the numerous activities of UC4 were transferred to the single information environment of the Ultimate IEM.

Storing customer information.
All customer properties that change over time (addresses, classification codes, activities, executive officers, accountants, founders, ownership capital) now exist as periodic fields in the partners registry. Consequently, data that are relevant on a given date are provided automatically by means of the Ultimate Solid platform​.
Or, if we put this into the human language, if a last year’s invoice is being printed, the system automatically inserts names of director/chief accountant, address, etc., relevant for that date.
In the time of MS Sharepoint, information on each changeable property had to be manually requested through audit history.

The structure of storing linked files (scanned copies or whatever) is rigid (set up by the user company’s administrator) with a capability to add folders.
Minor improvements in working with attachments were added, such as: downloading all files while keeping their structure, simultaneous adding of a large number of files, drag & drop, etc.

Task management mechanism was designed from scratch.
Ultimate data abstraction includes customer’s organizational structure.
Correlation of organizational units, people, who work there, and tasks that they’re responsible for is unambiguous.
There’s a list of notifications about a task being completed/overdue/due soon (positions and/or specific employees can be specified here), people in charge and task owners.

For complex tasks, instead of passing responsibility back and forth from one employee to another, now there’s a tree-structured instrument of ‘child’ tasks with unrestricted nesting depth, that the owner of the original task creates and sends to the relevant company division. The instrument that controls execution of subtasks, as well as of the whole ‘tree’, runs in the background mode.
Making a change in the task duration is only possible with the permission of its author.

There’s automatic messaging to task authors, owners and responsible people about overdue and changes in the task status.
Visual representation of the task recency and priority can be configured in terms of color: overdue, due soon, urgent.

What’s the net effect?
Decrease in the amount of tasks overdue from 60% to the level of statistical discrepancy. Increase in customer satisfaction, since every ‘task’ registered in the system is an electronic representation of a customer’s vital need in the UC4 services.
A significant increase in employees’ labor efficiency, who now work within a single window and in a single system.

What we’ve said above is only a small (and not even the most interesting) part of the implemented Ultimate solution features (the rest is to follow). Generally speaking, the number of UC4 employees that they  are now planning  to make redundant is measured, let’s phrase it carefully, in tens of percent of all the staff employed.
While the business volume growth of the same scale is expected.